Resources

As you are surely aware, we here at Ladydrawers HQ—in conjunction with pals actually literally around the world—are working hard to gather any and every bit of data we can on race, gender, physical ability, maternity, and economics in the comics industry, everywhere. This, as you can imagine, is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when it is all volunteer run by folks who don’t get paid a ton in their regular jobs. Which, by the way, is just as true for women in comics in the US as it is for women in comics in Finland, if our current findings are any indication! (Spoiler alert: they are.)

That being said, through the tireless efforts of Vienna-based women’s rights and culture organizer Katharina Brandl, we have just added a German language edition of our international comics survey! Please forward it far and wide to all your German-speaking comics-creating pals (and those who aspire to such an exalted position) so we can continue to provide you with interesting and depressing information on global freedom of expression!

We are working hard to complete Swedish, Malay, Russian, French, Japanese, and other versions of the survey now. (If you have language skills to donate, please get in touch!) In response to our current translations, we could use more male and non-binary respondents. We would like to have more English-speaking respondents. We appreciate the possibility of more Spanish- and Latvian-speaking respondents. We crave more dolphin respondents, but what are you gonna do? We require more Italian-speaking respondents. To achieve these, we have decided leave all versions of the survey open until further notice.

That all being said, our handy guide to currently existing translations of the International Comics Survey is here:

Please click here to view 101 Things You Definitely Do Not Know About Comics, a silent film by Danielle Chenette, Anne Elizabeth Moore, and The Ladydrawers, presented in a somewhat truncated and very experimental —possibly even unsuccessful!—form at the Museum of Contemporary Art on July 27, 2013.

It contains our latest creation, a survey about emotional labor! We’re asking food service workers to participate by filling out a quick chart after each work shift. We’re seeking to gather data about how you feel at the end of your workday. By gauging the levels of happiness, stress, and pride people experience in an average day, we aim to expand upon and better define the concept of emotional labor. This information will be used to fuel discussion and creativity at Life and Labor, a workshop led by cartoonist Delia Jean and journalist Sarah Jaffe. (You can also download the survey here: but please return it to us at the email address below when you’re done!)

We encourage participants to share stories, drawings and notes about their on-the-job experiences. Just place them in the pre-addressed envelope and send them along with your completed survey! For more information, please email deliajean84@gmail.com. Thank you for your help with this project!

Truthout asked us to throw together some handy banner-ads for when they redesign the front page of their site, and the fabulous Nicole Boyett created these. Since the strip’s being used in classrooms and linked to all over the place, we wanted to post them for public use. We’re fans of diversity, you probably figured out, so feel free to use the one that is most appealing, and remember to use this link, which has all the strips—most recent first!

Delia Jean Hickey was drawing comics about gender and economics before she ever even heard of the Ladydrawers. (Check her hiLARious Station In Life Comics here. Like, now.) As part of the Ladydrawers crew, she researched the economics of the comics industry and, as a final project, drew comic from which the below is excerpted.

You can get the whole thing now at Challengers Comics, Chicago Comics, and the Graham Crackers in Lakeview, but by Monday they’re likely to be at all the other Chicago comic-book stores, too.